Why use the Team Onion?
The Team Onion is a lightweight yet powerful visualisation tool. It was created to keep teams small while delivering in the context of a larger organisation. It helps to break down silos, surface assumptions and build empathy. It facilitates meaningful conversations about the capabilities, time commitment, collaboration and communication patterns needed for teams to be successful.
The founding concepts behind the Team Onion are:
Silos stop work flowing smoothly. If work is blocked from getting into the hands of the people who need to use it, then you cannot create value.
Small teams can move faster because they can communicate and collaborate more effectively. Conversely, big teams have a more significant communication overhead, slower decision-making, and a greater cognitive load.
There must be explicit collaboration outside the core team to keep teams small and bridge silos.
Silos stop work flowing
Silos are the antithesis of empathy. They make it hard for ideas and work to flow, for people to share valuable information and for decisions to be made quickly, which is far from ideal when an organisation is trying to get everyone to pull in the same direction. Conversely, when you bring people together with diverse experiences and viewpoints, your team will have fewer blind spots and benefit from a wider pool of knowledge.
Here is a real-life scenario: a multidisciplinary agile team was working on an essential service; they had a mix of capabilities, a backlog that responded to change, and a delivery rhythm. But they weren’t able to get anything live.
The team said it was because other parts of the organisation were blocking them. Some examples are that security wouldn’t let them put anything live, and the policy team wouldn’t turn up to their workshops.
The people they were pointing at said they didn’t understand what the team was doing, what the team needed from them, and anyway, they were busy with other things, so why would they participate? It was no one’s fault, but everyone else’s fault — typical siloed organisational behaviour.
Modern approaches encourage small multidisciplinary teams with all the capabilities needed to design, build and deliver, working together to achieve an outcome, releasing value early and often.
Teams do not work in a vacuum
This is fine when an organisation is very small, and people play mixed roles, but what about large organisations with whole functions dedicated to activities like legal, policy, marketing, customer support and security? All capabilities needed could mean teams of fifty people or more. Certainly not small.
Small teams can move faster
A team is not just about the number of people in it but also about the relationship dynamics. Including how they interact with each other, their cultural norms, active conversations and shared history.
To function effectively in a team, each member needs to understand the relationships between themselves and the other people in the team as well as those between everyone else in the team.
“as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble.”
J. Richard Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at Harvard University [reference]
Adding more people to a team makes communication a more significant overhead, decision making becomes slower and cognitive load increases. And adding one person doesn’t just add one extra relationship; it adds many.
Here’s an illustration:
These relationships grow exponentially with new people; having 25 people on a team creates 300 relationships.
So what’s the ideal team size?
It depends, but a good rule of thumb often cited with digital teams is seven plus or minus two. That’s a range of five to nine people. That keeps your relationships between 10 and 36.
Overview of the Onion
The Team Onion is a three-layer model that helps people collaborate to visualise their wider team. The layers are core, collaborators and supporters. These layers then create discussion, prioritisation and actions to set up collaboration and communication patterns.
Read more on how to create your Team Onion here.
